NVIDIA brings the GTX 10 series to notebooks

After unveiling the desktop GeForce GTX 10 series earlier this year, NVIDIA is now bringing the GPUs to notebooks. The GTX 1080, 1070, and 1060 will be available in products from Acer, Alienware, ASUS, Clevo, EVGA, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Origin, Razer, Sager and XMG in the coming weeks.

Similar to Maxwell-based mobile offerings, the 16nm Pascal GTX 10 cards are desktop GPUs optimized for mobile use. The GTX 1080 on a notebook will offer nearly 90% of the same performance as its desktop counterpart, which means that the mobile GPU will be twice as fast as a fully-enabled desktop GTX 980.

NVIDIA is also sticking with the same core count as the desktop GTX 10 cards, and as such the GTX 1080 on mobile features a fully-enabled GP104 GPU with 2560 CUDA cores and 160 texture units. The GTX 1070 on mobile offers 2048 CUDA cores and 128 texture units. The 1080 comes with 8GB of GDDR5X video memory clocked at 10Gbps over a 256-bit wide memory bus, whereas the 1070 offers 8GB of GDDR5 memory at 8Gbps. The GTX 1060, meanwhile, has 1280 CUDA cores, 80 texture units, and 6GB of GDDR5 memory at 8Gbps.

The cards don't have the same clock speed as their desktop equivalent, with the GTX 1080 coming with a core clock of 1556MHz (versus 1607MHz for desktop). The move makes sense as the TDP of the mobile parts will have to be inevitably lower than the desktop cards owing to the thermal constraints. That said, NVIDIA is allowing its partners to factory overclock its mobile cards, which is a very interseting development.

Other additions include tweaks to G-SYNC, allowing notebook vendors to ship panels with 120Hz refresh rate and QHD screens. Battery Boost has also received a boost, with NVIDIA claiming that the technology will double playing time on a notebook by lowering quality settings automatically.

The move to a 16nm FinFET manufacturing node means that the GTX 10 series cards on mobile will offer significant gains in performance when compared to Maxwell, making the cards ready for VR gaming. We should be getting a look at the first notebooks with GTX 10 GPUs later this month, so stay tuned.